Celebrating the Cleveland School

Featuring the remarkable collection of the late Albert Wasserman

October - November, 2024

The Cleveland school is an umbrella under which the many artists of this region have flourished for more than a hundred years. Certainly the two or three decades following the turn of the 20th century marked a near zenith in production and virtuosity. Marsden Hartley, Abel Warshawsky, William Zorach, William Sommer and Charles Burchfield are already famous names from the period. Arguments, however, can be made for the 30s, 40s and postwar decades as the greatest, but really the story keeps going. The modernists and the regionalists make their marks while Schreckengost, Horace Potter and the Cleveland ceramicists catch fire. Carl Gaertner and his cronies’ create paintings that glorify the giant ladles at Republic Steel. Op Art is born right here in the late 50s and 60s with Julian Stanczak and the boys blinding the crowds at MoMA. By the 70s and 80s, neo-expressionism frees itself from abstraction with artists like Ken Nevadomi, Chris Pekoc and Doug Utter breaking the ice. And the now very famous CIA alum Dana Schutz following in the 90s and 2000s with brilliantly shocking canvases. The point is, there is, and has been, an incredible arts community centered in Cleveland, which we loosely and very proudly call the Cleveland School.

One of the great followers of the Cleveland School artists was the smart and sincere man who put his money where his heart was; the late, revered and one of a kind Albert Wasserman. For decades Albert, certainly among the earliest collectors of Cleveland School art, assiduously amassed a diverse and sophisticated array of most everything that was bubbling through Cleveland’s creative community.

WOLFS is proud to announce the sale of this collection opening Friday, October 4th. The sight of this collection all put together in the gallery is bedazzling with over 100 works including oil paintings, watercolors, ceramic works, bronze & glass sculpture.